


the curvature of our history

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 6x01 Tag, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Post Season 5, Season 6 Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 07:04:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15702255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: Jemma explains it in stark, clean details. The facts, only facts. There’s no room for the clouds of her own emotions.//Or, someone has to explain to Fitz what the hell has been going on.





	the curvature of our history

**Author's Note:**

> I was sick last week so I rewatched season 5 and this happened. I've been trying to reconcile how they're going to go forward with Simmons and Space!Fitz when the two characters have experienced such different circumstances but I realized while writing this that they might not be so far apart as I'd originally thought.

Jemma explains it in stark, clean details. The facts, only facts. There’s no room for the clouds of her own emotions. 

_It was still 2018._

_He’d only been asleep for a few months._

_He’d gone to the future to bring them back and succeeded._

_Now they were on an alternate timeline._

_They saved the future – he did._

_Then he died._

She doesn’t like saying that.

When he hears it, really hears it, a shock blanket wrapped around his shoulders, just the two of them sitting on a bunk in the Zephyr, his forehead pinches up, his eyebrows furrow down into his eyes and his mouth screws to the side. 

“How’d it happen?”

Jemma’s heartbeat stutters and metal floods into her mouth and she remembers the look on Mack’s face, so terribly sorry. How he’d told her, then held her as she collapsed in on herself. How she’d sat with her own shock blanket as May had carefully explained what had happened to her. 

“I wasn’t there.” She says instead. “Mack and May were.”

Then he looks at her, really looks at her, no fog from ice or confusion in his eyes, not giddy about how the Zephyr is in space, just curious, as he has been for years, about something she has to tell him. 

“Jemma,” he pleads, and she was always going to tell him anyway.

There are more facts at least, that she knows for certain. 

_There was an alien ship attacking._

_He’d saved Polly._

_The building had been destabilized._

_And it- and it-_

“Collapsed.” He breathes, rubs two fingers over his unshaven jaw. 

“What about-“ he changes the subject. “What about us?” 

His eyes catch on her hand. She’d spent the last three days – how long it had taken for them to reach him once they’d found the coordinates of the ship – agonizing over whether to wear the ring or not. In the end she couldn’t bear to part with it. 

“We got married. Not officially, Coulson did the service.”

He stares down at his hands. She tugs her lower lip between her teeth and tries to remember the Fitz she met at the Lighthouse in the future. It’s the same man, however difficult she finds that to reconcile. That man wanted to marry her, so this one shouldn’t be disappointed. 

“I’m-“ his breath is shaking like he’s shivering but he’s said three times in the last hour he was never actually cold. “I’m sorry I missed that.”

She almost laughs. Only in their lives could he miss his own wedding. 

“Me too.”

“I- I had a speech. All planned out and everything did-?”

She nods too quickly. “Apparently, but I didn’t get to hear it.”

“Oh.”

“You told me it later though.”

The first moment they had _alone_ that Fitz had kissed her throat and whispered words in her ear about galaxies and oceans, about curses and time travel, and she’d kissed him hard, leaving _yes_ on a breath between them. 

“Oh, good.” He smiles, the one he’s always only given to her.

Then she breaks. The logic – there is an alternate version of him from the other timeline, still floating in space, still out there – the lies she’s told herself to keep herself upright and living – he’s not dead, he’s not dead, he’s not dead – come crashing down. It’s cold nights alone all over again, worrying, wondering. Shivering in one of the tiny bunks on the Zephyr, talking herself in circles, _they will find him, he will always come back to her._

Tears burn through her throat and bubble up into her vision and she can only gasp. 

“Hey, Jemma, breathe.” He takes her hands and the space between them – she put it there, to allow him room to adjust – dissolves. She curls into his chest as the hot flash of tears overtakes her and he wraps his shock blanket, scratchy grey wool, around them both. 

 

“I don’t know where we should be,” she admits, later. Her head is on his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart, and they’re curled up in the same bunk that has served as her prison every night for the last three months. She could slip off into unconsciousness so easily, bone tired and weary as she is, but she doesn’t want to leave him. (She doesn’t dare consider it’s all been a dream.)

“Me either.” His voice rumbles low in his chest and his hand catches her wrist, thumb stroking over her pulse point. He’s been skimming his fingers all over her body, like he’s trying to assure himself she’s real but can’t decide where is best to start. He’s rubbed the ends of her hair against his fingertips and followed the curve of her waist with his palm and wrapped his fingers around the sure, bare skin of her upper arm. 

She shivers when he draws a line down her throat with his forefinger, from underneath her jaw then into the hollow of her collar bone. His eyes darken but he pulls away, moving on to skip his thumb over the outlined tendons on the back of her hand. 

“For months I’ve felt like I’d lost you but now-“ She stops, she’s not sure where to go, where they go. 

He takes her hand, weaving their fingers together. “I- I feel the same. When Hale had me locked up I was so sure-“

“Sure?” She asks because she needs to know, she needs to face his reality as well as her own. She tilts her neck up to look at him and his forehead is pinched as he traces over her shoulder blade with the pads of his fingers. 

He kisses the cotton shoulder of her t-shirt and speaks slowly. “That you were gone, that you’d gone.”

She sucks in a breath, more tears cropping up in her throat. She swallows them away and tilts his jaw to meet his eyes. “I won’t ever leave you behind.” 

It was why he had to die. She’d realized that on one of her worse nights, sitting in the cockpit monitoring the autopilot as they floated through space. The view wasn’t as comforting to her as it had been as a little girl, even through her awe and curiosity of unfamiliar constellations, there was too much fear injected into it now, after the future, after Maveth. 

The timelines had to reconcile themselves, she’d realized. Because even if that Fitz hadn’t died, she couldn’t have let this Fitz float in the abyss for the rest of her life, waiting to save a future he’d already cured. And because of that, because there couldn’t be two versions of him stretched across the cosmos, something – space-time? she didn’t know what – had corrected. A new chain of events had been created to lead to his death. 

“I know, Jemma.” He takes her hands again and she holds onto his. “I know.”

“I love you,” she asserts, because she sometimes wonders. He carries so much weight on his shoulders, he always has, and she knows he’s always felt like he’s a little unworthy of her, has since they were teenagers, and he was trying to think of something clever to get her attention. Like she’s some great pillar of strength or intellect or moral center when she’s only just trying, like him, to get through the hard days. He sees the world in her, she knows, but what she doesn’t think he realizes is that it goes both ways. 

He smiles, and it breaks over his face piece by piece, so beautifully she can’t help but mirror it. “I love you too.”

“And,” he takes a breath, “I’d never leave you behind either, but you know that. And I’m gonna do everything I can to make this work Jemma, because I’ve literally defied death here so obviously it’s going to take a lot more than that for me to lose you.”

She grins. “I feel exactly the same way.”

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think if you feel so inclined, comments do make my day brighter. I'm also around on tumblr @sinkingsidewalks


End file.
